Film/movie catchup: Slumdog Millionaire, Valkyrie, Milk

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This is the pick of the bunch.  It starts with a torture scene, and at times is hard to watch, and yet so much of it has you on the edge of your seat, utterly engaged with these characters and this story, as you find out how Jamal, a chai wallah (tea boy) and slumdog, knows the answers to the TV quiz questions.  A terrific film.

Competent, workmanlike, at times tense - I'm damning it with faint praise, aren't I?  I'm not sure how much of that is due to the fact that one knows the outcome - the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler failed - and yet I'm happy to say that I learned new information about the immediate aftermath of the plot.  The British headliner actors do their thing - although Bill Nighy's general is so fluttery you wonder how he would have become a general - and I was glad to learn at the end that Von Stauffenberg's wife and children survived.  It's by no means a terrible film, but it's not a great one, either.

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Sean Penn is such an accomplished actor.  He is so different in this to the contained man of The Interpreter, or the death row inmate in Dead Man Walking.  It's a biopic done with care and attention, well acted, using archival footage to make you realise how much, in some ways, the world has changed.

As the cinema didn't have posters of Slumdog Millionaire or Milk, I've used and acknowledged posters from http://www.impawards.com/, where among other interesting possibilities you can search posters by designer.  So click here to see the many other striking posters designed by the same person as did the one for Slumdog Millionaire.

And what else did the cinemas have to offer this week?  Air conditioning....and it's good to pack in a few before the holidays end and the world of work takes over next week.